Publisher will honor all purchases made before issue was fixed.

UPDATE: While a lot of people got unexpected free games out of this glitch, some Origin users who legitimately took the survey were locked out of their reward after EA disabled the coupon code Sunday morning (including some users who took the survey as recently as today). The publisher has now committed to providing these customers with an updated coupon code in the next few days.

"We wanted to clear up the confusion: all users that completed the survey will receive an email soon (in the next one to two days) which will contain a new code for $20 off a purchase of any EA game on Origin priced $19.99 or above," EA said in a statement on the Origin forums.

ORIGINAL STORY:

In the real world, there's a good reason most coupons say "Limit: one per customer." In the digital world, EA found out just how costly neglecting such a limit can be. An offer meant to reward players with a single game instead allowed the entire Internet to unlock a good chunk of Origin's game library for free over the weekend.

It all started when EA sent out a coupon code good for any Origin game listed at $20 or less as a thank you to users who filled out an online survey. But instead of generating a unique code for each user, EA sent a generic, static code that could be used by anyone with an Origin account.

That might not have been so bad for EA, if users didn't quickly discover that that same code could be used multiple times by a single purchaser by simply playing around with log-in cookies (other workarounds had users enter the code from the Web store and Origin application at the same time, or create multiple accounts to use the coupon multiple times). Since Origin apparently didn't perform a server-side check to determine if a user had already redeemed the coupon, anyone could essentially use the code for free copies of any or all of the 180 or so Origin games listed for $20 or less, a list that included a lot of well-known titles.

Word of the coupon exploit spread quickly on Saturday through gaming forums like GameFAQs and Reddit, causing a flood of users that actually crashed the Origin Web store briefly. EA fixed the problem and rescinded the coupon code early Sunday morning, but Community Manager Sam Houston said in a forum post later that day the company would honor all sales made over the weekend.

While EA might lose a few potential sales to the exploit, the biggest direct cost from the snafu is probably a higher-than-normal bandwidth bill for the weekend. The whole incident might cause a bigger hit to Origin's reputation among gamers, which wasn't too sterling to begin with. Then again, maybe EA could consider this a form a stealth marketing for its digital download service. After all, users are going to have to get used to using Origin if they want to actually play all those free games.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.